RAMI SHERMAN
FOR THE past three years, Rami Sherman has left behind his kibbutz home in northern Israel and crisscrossed the globe to audiences eager to hear his story.
He has been in Britain for the last three weeks, receiving a spellbound reception as he recalls the scarcely credible events of July 4 1976, when he and elite forces of the IDF rescued 102 Jewish and Israeli hostages from capture in Entebbe, Uganda. The effrontery of the daring and successful raid made headlines around the world — but it’s only recently that Mr Sherman has been able to talk about the events of that hot summer week.
On June 27 1976, the 23-year-old kibbutznik was the operations officer of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit. He had spent the weekend at home and was returning to base when news filtered through that an Air France plane had been hijacked by Palestinian terrorists.
“We thought it might land at Lod [later Ben-Gurion] Airport but we didn’t know what would happen,” he told the JC. Israel in those days had one strictly controlled TV channel — most people opted for radio news —but Mr Sherman said he and his colleagues were kept informed by army intelligence.
“We heard that the plane had landed at Benghazi in Libya and had taken off from there and we thought, well, Libya is so far away, there’s nothing we can do about this.”
The soldiers of Sayeret Matkal went down to the Sinai to carry out other duties. In the meantime, a furious debate was taking place inside the cabinet about what, if any, action to take.
“We felt there was hardly a plan in place to go to Entebbe,” Mr Sherman said. “We barely talked about it as an option, because we believed it was too far away for us to do something”.
But a plan had indeed been hatched and eventually Dan Shomron, the overall commander of what was codenamed Operation Thunderbolt, gave the order to Sayeret Matkal and two other commando units.
“We were told on Thursday night [before the rescue on Saturday night] that our task would be to free the hostages from the Old Terminal at Entebbe”.
65 men from Rami Sherman’s unit were part of the 240-strong squad that landed in Entebbe in three Hercules jets.
“It was a very unpleasant flight,” Mr Sherman recalled. “The Hercules was full of equipment — including cars — and many soldiers, and we were flying very low. Almost everyone was vomiting”.
He said that even on the Saturday morning before they left,